BT ,we want out.

We are one year into a 2 year contract. Used to have a phone and an internet account.
They said we should change it to a One Bill account to combine them both.
So they cancelled our standing orders and didn't set up a new one.
Then the threatening letters come saying they will take action over non payment. Spent god knows how many hours telling them about our One Account. Each time they would say its sorted then the letters would start again.
Anyway just before Christmas (2days after they took payment) they cut us off.
This line is the one we use for our credit card machine. So we lost sales at our busiest time of year and I had to spend a morning trying to make them put it back on.
Do you think we have grounds to cancel our contract? Surely BT not providing a service we have paid for means they have not kept their part of the deal.

The individual staff of BT have always been friendly courteous and helpful. They are however usually powerless and the company itself is the most autocratic shambles of shite I've ever had to deal with.

I had the exact same problem a few years ago when I moved business premises.

They combined the new lines on a One Bill account but didn't seem to know themselves that they'd done it and got more and more threatening demanding payment for lines that were already being paid for. Took ages to sort it out.

Yep, we had BT take a month to connect the national charity that owns our office when we moved. The BT (fibre) line was in, the office cabling was in (and had been connected), but supposedly the BT chaps had cut off the old cable (quite literally) on the previous owners. It took a MONTH and numerous visits from BT / Openreach / gimp chaps who kept looking at it and sucking breath...then they connected it and promtly told us that the office / server room wiring was duff hence lack of connection...It took the charity to pay an independent consultant to come in, test it all and announce it was BT upstream end that was the issue...it was switched back on that day.
For the whole month, all the charity staff (50+ and our organisation of 10+) were all on '3' 3G dongles to be able to work...
Then BT sent them the bill for the month they had not been connected...
BT could not organise a connection in an office, let alone an evening in a brewery.

Yep, we had BT take a month to connect the national charity that owns our office when we moved. The BT (fibre) line was in, the office cabling was in (and had been connected), but supposedly the BT chaps had cut off the old cable (quite literally) on the previous owners. It took a MONTH and numerous visits from BT / Openreach / gimp chaps who kept looking at it and sucking breath...then they connected it and promtly told us that the office / server room wiring was duff hence lack of connection...It took the charity to pay an independent consultant to come in, test it all and announce it was BT upstream end that was the issue...it was switched back on that day.
For the whole month, all the charity staff (50+ and our organisation of 10+) were all on '3' 3G dongles to be able to work...
Then BT sent them the bill for the month they had not been connected...
BT could not organise a connection in an office, let alone an evening in a brewery.

Had almost exactly the same in my house. They'd disconnected at the top of the pole when a previous owner moved out, and apparently H&S now means they can't just climb back up. Which meant they needed a cherry picker, which wouldn't fit, so they needed scaffolding, which they wanted me to pay for, this is still their infrastructure which they'd sabotaged, the cable going into the house was fine!

Told them to stuff themselves and refund me the 'connection fee' I'd paid upfront. 3 dongle was adequately fast and less than BT broadband anyway (especially as there's no 'line rental' ontop of the broadband).

If it helps I twittered about BTInfinity showing live at my house on their checker but not being able to order. I got a response as a DM within minutes and they responded to each query very quickly too, after a about 2 or 3 replies they rang me to discuss it. Also told me just to get in touch the same way in future.

So a tweet might be worth a try as they appear to have teams monitoring it.

the thing about a legally binding contract is, it's a legally binding contract.

However, I'd hazard that in not providing you with a service you're paying for, they are in breach of contact which should empower you to tell them to roll it tightly and grease it lightly.

I'd hazard you've buckley's of recovering any lost revenue though, unless there's specific terms in the contract which cover this; it's not BT's fault you're using it as a credit card line, assuming it's a regular domestic contract then as far as they know it's "just" a phone line and "just" an ADSL line. If it was mission critical and the loss of it is going to cost you money, then you should either have a connection with an SLA which reflects that and insures you accordingly, or have two of them.

I was with the post office for 7years and they are a real shower of s@-t! We moved to BT and have had no problems, plus the broadband is 0.8mb faster than the post office and we live further away from the exchange.

Most of them are still BT, that's why. A Post Office connection from over seven years ago is almost certainly BT Wholesale resold, all that changes is who you give money to. The increase in speed was probably from replacing a seven year old router.

Not quite the same, but many years ago someone high up from NTL spotted my tail of woe on cableforums & contacted me directly.
Next day I had two of their best engineers & an area manager camped out at my house at 8am, & they were told they couldn't leave until the CS director had spoken to me personally & I was happy.
Got many months free line rental too.

I'd always thought this type of thing was an urban legend but sometimes I guess it actually happens.

I hope you get it sorted zippykona, as from your posts on here you sound like a really top chap.

We're thinking of changing to BT (mostly for the free MotoGP coverage on BT Sport).

I'm in the process of leaving TT to go with BT. The BB speed was my issue. The call centre & staff have been excellent. The TT system is crippled by lack of capacity in the local exchange. They're unable/unwilling to change things.

Bt are putting fibre optic in our area at the end of March.
I believe plus net use bt lines so will probably go with them once the line is in.
To be honest BT are fine at the moment as we don't need to use much internet. It's just that they've **** me off and I'm too stubborn to just get over it.

I always find these threads about BT fascinating as I've literally never had a bad experience with BT at all. Line faults, broadband faults (even on other providers!) have been resolved in less than a day and with no fuss, billing questions, contract changes have happened without fail.